The Half Life Read online

  “Don’t worry,” said one of her housemates, a girl named Lisa whom she vaguely remembered from her residence hall. “He’s hardly ever here.”

  “Where does he go?” Piper asked.

  Lisa lifted her eyebrows and gave a knowing smirk. “He makes friends easily.”

  Piper met him on the beach that night. There was a bonfire, the obligatory keg of beer, and even though normally after a day in the sun and the water nothing would have made her happier than to shower, have a dinner of tomatoes and sweet corn, and curl up with her book, she’d decided that the only way to get through her weekends would be to spend as much time as possible out of the house. She’d waited in line for the shower, rinsed her hair and washed the salt and sand off her body as fast as she could, then pulled on a loose cotton skirt and a tank top, twisted her wet hair into a bun, and carried her flip-flops, her copy of Pride and Prejudice, and a can of Off! down to the beach. She was sitting on the dune, her legs tucked underneath her, marveling at the girls prancing around in string bikinis and wondering if there was enough light from the bonfire to read by, when the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen plopped down beside her.

  “I hear we’re sleeping together,” he said.

  Piper stared at him, feeling every bit of moisture disappear from her mouth, along with every word she’d ever known. His skin was as smooth and brown as polished sandalwood; his hair, black and glossy, was gathered into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. Almond-shaped eyes glittered, curving enticingly upward as he looked at her. His hands, wrapped around his knees, were strong, the fingers long, the nails short and curved, neatly clipped. As Piper tried not to stare, he reached out one warm, square-shaped hand. After a moment, remembering what was expected, she took it, sliding her palm against his warm one, feeling, for the first time, those strong fingers against her skin.

  “Hello, roomie,” said Tosh DeWitt, whose father was African-American and whose mother was Japanese, who’d majored in fine arts at NYU and who would, two weeks later, take Piper’s virginity on an old comforter that they spread on top of the warm sand, underneath the stars. She surrendered it joyfully, in love for the first time in her life, intoxicated by everything about her boyfriend—his chest, bulging firmly into her hands when she slid them underneath his shirt, the way his hair was so glossy that it always looked wet, his brilliantly white teeth against his full lips. Tosh wasn’t just handsome, he wasn’t even merely gorgeous or any of the words that typically applied to men. Tosh was beautiful, beautiful in body and face and spirit too, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen or imagined, and somehow, through some miracle, he loved her too, loved skinny, freckled, slightly-bucktoothed-in-spite-of-the-braces Piper Garroway, who knew, even at twenty-two, that there was nothing exotic or alluring about her with the possible exception of her first name.

  “Ma’am?” A woman in a blue suit was patting her shoulder. Piper sat up, cotton-mouthed, foggy-eyed, blinking.

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman said, “but your flight has been canceled.”

  “What?”

  “There was a volcanic eruption in Iceland.” Piper stared. Was this a joke? Were there even volcanoes in Iceland?

  “The ash from the volcano has been spreading across Europe. No planes are landing in Paris right now.”

  “Tomorrow?” asked Piper. Her heart was sinking. She’d have to go home, to her empty bed; she’d have to face Tosh’s absence, to tell her mother and Nola the truth.

  The woman shrugged. “We just don’t know yet. We’ll keep you posted, of course.” She handed her a piece of paper with a toll-free number and an email address. Piper stood, lifting her bag, wondering about her luggage, already checked through to Paris. In the chair beside her, a man in a gray suit was getting to his feet.

  “You too?” he asked.

  She nodded, picking up her purse and computer bag, already thinking about whether there was coffee at home and how she’d get her suitcase back when the man said, “The Four Seasons has rooms.”

  She looked at him. “If you need a place to stay tonight,” he added. He was a good-looking guy, with a thick mop of brown hair laced with silver, tall and rangy, wearing his suit and lace-up wing tips like a costume, like a boy dressed up for Halloween in Dad’s going-to-the-office clothes. He pointed at Piper’s wallet. “You got an American Express card?”

  She nodded. This man, she knew, would never tease her for firing people for a living. This man would understand the demands of her job, the way she had to dive into different corporations with different cultures all over the world. Unlike her husband, this man would be impressed.

  “Call the concierge,” the guy advised. “Tell them you’re stuck in Philadelphia . . .” She saw his mouth pucker as he spoke her city’s name, which made her smile—people had such prejudice about Philadelphia. “And you need a room for the night.”

  She fumbled for her phone, her fingers brushing, once more, at Tosh’s envelope, when the man spoke again. “Hey, how ’bout we share a cab? You can call them from there. I want to get going.” He bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, clearly eager to be on the move. Piper wondered whether he was an athlete, a runner or maybe a rugby player. She imagined him in cleats and white cotton shorts that left his strong legs bare, racing up and down a field, calling to his teammates. Tosh swam, a solitary, silent activity that suited him perfectly. He’d cut through the water like one of his own moving installations, graceful and absolutely alone. But this guy . . .

  He held out his hand with an appealing smile. No ring. “Mark Bancroft.”

  Actually, I live here, she said in her head. And I have to get home. But then she realized that she did not in fact have to go home. Her mother would be fine. Nola would be fine. In fact, it might be more disruptive if Piper appeared, only to leave again. And Tosh . . .

  Without letting the thought continue, she took Mark’s hand. “Piper Garroway,” she said, even though she hadn’t been Piper Garroway for sixteen years . . . and then, laptop bag swinging briskly, she followed the man through the lounge’s sliding doors, down the escalator, and out into the cool spring night. “Volcano,” he said, shaking his head. “Volcano,” she repeated, and surprised herself by laughing.

  She thought that she knew how Mark Bancroft might imagine their evening would proceed. She’d seen enough films and TV shows about business travelers and the trouble they got into on the road . . . and although she would have never admitted it, watched the occasional pornographic movie, alone in a hotel room during one of her long business trips. There would be a getting-to-know conversation in the cab, coy glances in the check-in line, and then, after they’d been to their respective rooms, they’d meet for a drink in the hotel bar. Drinks would turn into dinner . . . or maybe just an invitation to come upstairs, so he could, say, show her something on his laptop. Then, in the semidarkness of a strange room, he would grip her shoulders, lightly tracing her lips with one fingertip, before leaning in and kissing her.

  For a moment she let herself imagine that it was Tosh in that room . . . Tosh, and not a stranger; Tosh meeting her at the Four Seasons the night she came back from Paris. “I’m sorry,” he would say, easing her back on the bed. “I love you,” he’d tell her, his talented fingers working at the hooks and buttons of her clothes. “I want us to be a family again.” Then, without intending it, she found herself thinking of a night with Tosh—a night without Tosh, really—three weeks earlier. At ten o’clock, after Nola had made her requisite three trips downstairs to ask for a drink of water and another kiss and an escort to the potty, Piper had put on her prettiest (and only) negligee, short and white and sheer, with a bodice made of lace panels. In the bedroom where she slept alone, she lit a candle, dimmed the lights, dabbed perfume behind her ears, and called down to the basement, telling Tosh that the toilet was clogged (a terrible pretext, but the best she’d been able to think of at the time). He’d come plodding up the two flights of stairs, eyes downcast, face set in tense lines, carrying t
he plunger. She’d been waiting by the door. He’d pushed right past her into the bathroom, where he’d flushed the toilet twice and said, “It seems fine to me.”

  “Tosh,” she’d called hopelessly, helplessly, at his departing back. He hadn’t even turned around.

  “Dump some Clorox in the bowl if it’s still slow,” he’d said, and closed the bedroom door behind him.

  He didn’t want her. She hadn’t been willing to acknowledge it at the time. She’d told herself that he was preoccupied, that he was disappointed about losing his job, that he was possibly even depressed. She’d taken off her silly, frilly white nightgown, pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt, and spent the next hour online, researching therapists who specialized in treating artists and other creative types, printing out a list and leaving it on the breakfast table the next morning, when the truth was, Tosh wasn’t depressed . . . or if he was, it was his problem. He didn’t need a therapist . . . or at least he didn’t need Piper to find him one. Tosh didn’t love her anymore. He’d told her in words, he’d told her in deeds, he’d told her when he’d moved all of his books and clothing to the basement, when he’d refused to help her plan a family vacation, when he’d let her take Nola to the zoo and the children’s museum by herself on Sunday afternoons, ostensibly so he could work, but now it was as obvious as a slap in the face, as clear as a cloud of ash darkening the Parisian sky. Tosh doesn’t love me anymore, she thought . . . and then, fast on the heels of that thought came another, a black cloud obscuring her interior horizons: . . . and maybe he never did. And maybe no one ever will.

  “So,” said the man sitting beside her in the backseat of a cab that smelled like incense. What was his name? Mike? Matt? No, it was Mark. Mark Bancroft. “Where were you headed before all this?”

  Instead of answering, she thought about saying, Would you kiss me? Just so I know that someone else someday will want to? Then she remembered that annoying sexist stereotype: Women talk. Men do. So when an almost insane impulse struck, Piper followed it, scooting across the seat just as the taxi turned sharply, nearly spilling her into his lap. Mark opened his mouth—maybe to ask if she was all right—and she met his lips with her own.

  At first his body stiffened, and she steeled herself for the humiliating moment when he’d push her away. Then his body yielded, his lips softened. His long-fingered, ringless left hand reached up to cup her breast, while his right hand pressed at the nape of her neck, urging her against him as they kissed.

  So different, she marveled. This man, this Mark, had a different body (taller and slimmer than Tosh’s compact, muscular frame), thinner lips, a taste that reminded her of wintergreen LifeSavers. She pressed against him, listening with voluptuous delight as he murmured, “Oh, God,” before reaching for her again. I don’t care, she thought . . . and she wasn’t thinking of Tosh, of Nola, of her mother, cutting up apple slices and boiling pasta for her daughter’s dinner, not thinking of anything except that she was between. It was as if she were in an elevator stalled between floors or on a plane stuck on the runway. She was nowhere, and she could take what she thought she deserved like it was a package of overpriced nuts from the minibar that someone else would pay for. It doesn’t matter, she thought, and pressed herself against him.

  They kissed as the cab sped down I-95, and the driver continued to talk cheerfully in what Piper thought was French into his hands-free headset. At some point Mark unhooked her bra and slid his hands up the back of her blouse, stroking her back. The Philadelphia blurring past the cab’s smeared windows seemed like a different city than the one she inhabited, where she’d pushed Nola in her stroller to her pediatrician and her playgroup, where she had a bank and a dentist and a gynecologist and a regular Pilates class, where she had once walked to brunch on sunny Sundays holding her husband’s hand. In this no-place, this between-place, with her rings in her pocket and Tosh’s letter unopened in her purse, she could be someone else, or no one at all.

  Mark’s tongue slipped into her mouth. She gripped his shoulders, fingers grasping the muscles beneath his shirt as the cab turned sharply, then stopped. “Hello, young lovahs!” the driver called. A uniformed doorman said, “Welcome to the Four Seasons,” and swung the cab door open.

  Piper fumbled with her bra. Mark collected their bags from the cabbie and, with his free hand at the small of her back, led her through the heavy glass doors, held open by more young men in uniforms, like soldiers in some small and fashionable army. “Wait here,” Mark said, settling her into a chair in the marble lobby. His face was flushed, his voice hoarse as a teenager’s. I did that, thought Piper, and instead of feeling sick with guilt, the way she should have been, she smiled. She sat, half hidden behind a towering floral arrangement, with heavy-headed lilies drooping almost to the ebony marble tabletop, as he went to the desk and made the arrangements. Holding the key card, staring at her unsmilingly, intently, with a look on his face that said, Oh, the things I’m going to do to you, this man, this stranger, stretched out his hand. Piper took it.

  * * *

  I’m a ghost, Piper thought as she opened her eyes. Above her a silk canopy, pale blue, fringed in gold. To her left the windows, draped in the same heavy, swagged silk. To her right a nude man who was not her husband, a man named Mark Bancroft whom she’d met in the airport lounge the day before and slept with less than an hour later.

  A ghost, she thought again, slipping out of the bed and into the bathroom, scooping up her clothes from the floor along the way. A ghost in my own town. She wasn’t registered at the hotel—she’d gone right from the cab to this stranger’s room. As far as her mother and her daughter and her husband knew, she was in Paris right now, almost half a world away.

  The New York Times was lying in front of the door. VOLCANIC ASH CONTINUES TO SPREAD, STRANDING TRAVELERS, read the headline, underneath a photograph of a large gray cloud, black shading to silver, enormous and strangely beautiful. Icelandic volcano, she thought, and shook her head. Who would ever have believed it?

  She scooped up the paper and stepped under the shower, washing quickly, then wrapping herself in a towel and using the tiny bottle of mouthwash and a fingertip to scrub her teeth. She should have felt horrible, sick with shame, racked with guilt, but instead she felt almost giddy, the way she imagined an archeologist just off a particularly rewarding dig would feel. It had all been so different with this new guy, with his lanky body and thin, insistent lips and, most of all, the noises he made. For ten years of her sex life she’d had nothing but Tosh’s silence, punctuated with at most a single sharp inhalation of pleasure. Mark was a whisperer, a crooner, even (she blushed to remember) a dirty talker. He’d murmured praise for her breasts as he’d uncovered them, told her, “God, you’re gorgeous” as they moved together. He had nuzzled and nipped at her ear and then, spent and sweaty, had slung a companionable arm around her shoulders and said, “I’m going to send that volcano a thank-you note, young lady.”

  Young lady, she thought, and found that she was smiling and felt wonderful, as if she’d had eight hours of restorative sleep and a foot massage. Once she was dressed, she picked up her shoes and padded, barefoot, back out into the dim room. She found a pad of Four Seasons—embossed stationery and a pen on the credenza just inside the door, considered for a moment, then wrote, Thank you for a lovely evening, and signed her first name. She thought about adding her cell-phone number, but decided not to. Maybe she’d see Mark again. She was surprised to find that she didn’t much care one way or the other. It had been a lovely evening, maybe even a necessary one, but not one she felt an urgent need to repeat. She smiled again, remembering the first time she’d taken her mother out for sushi. “It was interesting,” Deborah had pronounced, “but I don’t think I’d want to eat it every night.”

  Which left the question: On this day of between-time, when she could move around anonymous and undetected, when for at least a few more hours everyone who knew her expected her to be half a world away, what did Piper want to do?

&nbs
p; * * *

  She put on her shoes in the hall, slipped her bracelet out of her pocket and slid it onto her wrist, but left her rings—her wedding and engagement rings—in her pocket, where they’d been since she passed through airport security. Then, with her laptop bag in one hand and her carry-on in the other, she walked down the carpeted hall to the elevator. It was still early, just before seven, but the lobby was crowded with people who were, literally, her fellow travelers: men in suits and women in skirts and hose and heels, people with jobs like hers, in sales or consulting, work that sent them crisscrossing the country or even the world, living out of suitcases and Skyping their kids to sleep at night. With their computer cases and wheeled carry-ons sitting by their feet like dogs at heel, they frowned into their laptops or talked into their phones.

  Piper found an empty chair overlooking the hotel’s lush garden, logged into the wireless network, and fired off a quick email to her boss, telling him what had happened and that she’d be taking the day off. Then she folded her laptop and reached into her purse for the letter her husband had put there, the one she’d been avoiding since she’d become aware of its existence on her cab ride to the airport the day before.

  It was written on a single piece of graph paper, the kind Tosh used to sketch out his sculptures. The page was stained and crumpled, as if he’d started writing, then stopped, folded the letter in his pocket and left it there, before pulling it out and starting again.